Wednesday, 12 February 2014

How we could do with a Thomas Paine right now

He has a statue and a hotel named after him in the town
where he was born, but how many Thetford people really know who Thomas Paine
was? It’s a question a few of those who do know have been asking, with some
justification.

And it’s not just in Thetford that the author of The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason is less well known
than he should be.

A dozen years ago, in a poll run by the BBC, Paine was
placed 34th in a list of the 100 “greatest Britons”. Just above him
were a so-so footballer, David Beckham, and a slightly better than so-so
comedian, Eric Morecambe, which says everything about how seriously that poll
should be taken.

Of course, it’s impossible to name the greatest Briton with anything
resembling scientific objectivity. But if it could be done, Paine would be a
contender for the title, alongside Shakespeare, Darwin and Newton.

In its day (it was published in 1791), The Rights of Man was a million-seller, probably the most widely
read book in the world after the Bible and Koran.

Paine can’t really be said to be responsible for either the
American or French revolutions, but he provided the intellectual justification
for them.

And since it’s hard to imagine Karl Marx without the giant shoulders
of Paine for him to stand on, you might say he had a big hand in the Russian
revolution too.

Not that Paine (or Marx) should be blamed for all the
horrors the revolutions wrought. His concern was always to make life better for
the common man (and woman).

His writing, and his thinking, were clearer than Marx’s too.

Broadly speaking, he was against monarchy and for democracy.
Against the private ownership of land. For factory workers and against factory
owners. Against capital punishment (which he twice came close to suffering
himself). For liberty, equality and fraternity.

His ideas made him popular, and then unpopular, in both
America and France, in both of which countries he became an honorary citizen.

His claim of American nationality almost certainly saved him
from execution in England as a traitor for his polemic against the “tyranny” of
George III – and for encouraging the idea of a French invasion to spread the
revolution.

By the time the invasion came close to reality, France was
under the rule of Napoleon – a tyrant Paine regarded, rightly, as a traitor to
the revolution. (Much as Stalin would be to the Russian revolution, but that is
another story.)

Understandably unpopular with the ruling and property-owning
classes, Paine – the son of a corsetmaker and educated at Thetford Grammar
School – was never a traitor to the working class of this or any country.

The fact that he eventually fell out of favour in America,
whose independence he had done so much to encourage, was largely due to his
opposition to two things the new Americans held dear – slavery and religion.

Not that Paine was non-religious. He believed in God, just
not in church.

“All national institutions of churches,” he wrote, “whether
Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set
up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” And amen,
say I, to that.

Once one of the most popular men in America and the friend of
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, he had just six mourners at his funeral
in New York in 1809.

Back in 1776, one of Paine’s American opponents, James
Chalmers, had argued that if the colony rejected the British monarchy, the
country would “degenerate into democracy”. It would take the clear thinking of
a Thomas Paine to untangle all the ironies in that.

----

Knocking down the Mail (can’t really call it Royal any more)
at a fraction of its real value. Piecemeal privatising, de-professionalising
and de-skilling of teaching. Is there anything this tawdry government won’t
sell?

Now there is talk that the next vital thing to go under the
hammer could be access to NHS care records.

Had a drug problem? A sexually transmitted disease? A mental
health issue? An abortion? Heart trouble? Cancer? Until now, these things were
private matters between you and your GP.

But soon private companies may be
able to buy all this information from the new universal patient database.

What they get shouldn’t include your
name and address (though NHS staff can already put it all together with a few
clicks of a mouse). But it will all be linked to your postcode, gender and
ethnicity, so a little automated cross-checking against other databases could
make it very personal indeed.

You can imagine how insurance
companies might take advantage of such knowledge. And how that might work in a
future where health care is increasingly placed in private hands.

Well, it works in America, doesn’t
it?

Does it?

Before you settle happily for an
increasingly Americanised, post-NHS future, just consider these figures:

62 per cent of US bankruptcies are
the result of medical bills

75 pc of those bankrupted had health
insurance before they became sick.

They say you don’t know what you’ve
got till it’s gone. Let’s hope against hope that doesn’t come to apply any time
soon to the National Health.